Name: Anna Berill Bartal
Email: annaberillbartal@gmail.com
Facebook: @bartal.anna.berill – www.facebook.com/bartal.anna.berill
A bit later than I wanted, I'm participating in this challenge with a great will to learn and hope to experience a ton, and I'm very excited to start working on my character.
It was hard to choose a side, since I'm an unshakable fan of both sci-fi and fantasy. I have slight more experience in sci-fi, so I decided to go with a FANTASY champion, for what I think it will be more of a challenge for myself.
I'm planning a character based on "time" – a time-thief maybe, with the ability to control and shape the very Time to her will. I want her to have a slight "deserty" look beside a more elegant, steampunk-ish design. Also I will name her as the concept is taking shape, for what I want to find the most fitting name for her.
I like to leave myself the time to think it through clearly and well. For the first step, I started collecting inspirations, pictures of the era/culture I want my character to be placed in, searched for inspiration from the "real" world and cultures. Sometimes also games which have a good feeling in them help me to get in the right mood.
Looking forward to post my process here!
BRIEFLY ABOUT MY CHAMPION
Jayde (full name: Jayde Trafort) is a very lazy and careless person, who has a sarcastic and cynical attitude towards people – but with a kind, truth-seeking good soul hidden inside. She is very well confirmed of her strenghts and weaknesses, though she sometimes tends to overestimate herself. Physically, she is very weak, and because of that she relies only on her abilities. She is an illusionist mage with the ability to manipulate space and time around her. The hourglass she carries is an ancient magical artifact, which she stole from the old order she was a member of. If one has the potential to awake it, the sand within the artifact grants the power to call the Sand of the Desert for aid, to control it to the wielder’s will. Her abilities in general consist of slowing down, speeding up, even stopping the time for a small amount around her or creating the illusion for someone else only. She is able to open portals to travel back and forth in time for a small period, or draw her enemies into it.
She comes from a big, dark, blooming, self-supporting industrial city, Solim, which lies in the middle of a wast desert. She never left the desert in her entire life, though she never wants to – she considers the great dunes as her home, not even the city.
Jayde was born into the Ordo Temporum – an order under the authority of the city –, which consists of mages like her. Their duty is to watch over the Time, to take action if something goes wrong for the theoretical good of Solim and its population: erasing or manipulating events, situations, the most skilled were deployed even to take out unwanted people. There, specific people from the area, who showed signs of magical talent were sent in to get the training to acquire the power to shape and create the illusion of time. Temporians are feared or praised by the common folk; there is no inbetween. Some think they were sent by the Gods, some believe they are the demons itself.
Jayde hated the life in the order. When she grew old enough to be sent out on missions, she got suspicious – she never felt like doing something actual good and started to question the Temporians’ intentions. This led to her secretly leaving as well as managing to steal one of their guarded artifacts: the hourglass. When the order noticed her betrayal, they declared her as traitor, a dangerous “time-thief”. She became a traveler, always on the run, using her abilities to play against the game of the city and her order while helping the people who need it silently in the background.
FINISHED ILLUSTRATION
FINISHED CONCEPT SHEET
